May 21: The Rapture Meets My 40th Birthday

As lead-ups to fortieth
birthdays go, I recommend steering clear of subway preachers who
forecast the Rapture for the very day you’re most dreading. For 18
months now, End-Timers have been gathering daily, at the top of the
stairway to the train I take home from work, to press “Judgment Day”
tracts on unsuspecting commuters. I’m sure someone else,
someone who lacked
my fundamentalist baggage, would’ve laughed at the coincidence
and shaken it off, but to me it felt personal when the men turned
up there, with their pamphlets and placards and dire predictions,
as though the God I grew up fearing and eventually turned my back
on had orchestrated some final absurd cosmic joke. Of all the dates
in all the centuries over more than two millennia, why May 21,
2011?

My mother, a former preacher, would call it a warning. She may
not have her own church anymore, but she still believes the Second
Coming is nigh. She may, in fact, actually expect to be whisked off
to heaven on my birthday. I’m not going to ask. After a six-year
break from each other (it’s
complicated), we get along really well now that we don’t argue
about God anymore; when she alludes to Him or anything else I don’t want
to talk about, I change the subject. I’m an increasingly fervent
agnostic, if there can be such a thing: compulsively uncertain,
committed to doubt. I don’t believe in any deity—and certainly not
the Christian one, whose unfairness and sadism are so
repellent that even if He did exist I would gladly forgo His
company to burn in hell with people I actually like.

A confession, one sure to
enrage fervid atheists: though I don’t expect the End of the World
to be set in motion this Saturday night, I wouldn’t be entirely
surprised if it were. Fatalism comes easy when you grew up bracing
for the apocalypse, being told that that, sometime very soon,
probably next year but possibly tomorrow morning, a fiery mountain
would fall into the sea, the oceans would turn to blood and then
the moon would, and soon after that a third of all living things on
the earth would die. Never mind homework, forget the boy you had a
crush on, it would be best to turn down the lead role in the school
musical, for there was no time to waste. Jesus could return at any
moment, that was the crucial thing, and it was our duty to spread
the word. Also, to repent, because if you hadn’t been forgiven for
every sin you’d ever committed, no matter how tiny, even if you
didn’t know it was a sin, you’d be regrettably yet decisively Left
Behind. Rapture
Readiness is a hilarious cliche in the popular culture now, but
it’s no joke when you live it. I can’t tell you how many nights I
lay awake, obsessively begging the Lord for forgiveness, at the age
of eight.

You get steeped in this stuff as a kid, even if some part of you
was always skeptical, it’s hard to lose the residual sense that
everything unfolding in the world—from natural disasters to
commerce and geopolitics—signals some approaching doomsday. Or
maybe this sort of existential dread is actually just genetic. It
seems to run in my mom’s family.

***

Perhaps you’re gearing up to spend May 21 at a
Raptureparty or gassing
up your car for some
post-Rapture looting. Some of you may even expect to end the
night seated at the right hand of God. I intend to be touring the
bars of Provincetown—”an absolute sink of corruption,” my friend
Joan assures me—drunk as a clam at high tide, when the hour
arrives.

Obviously, given that it coincides with my fortieth, I’ll have
much more on my mind than Jesus’ failure to return. The withering
of my body, the decline of my intellect (such as it is), and the
rapid approach of the grave, not to mention my continued failure to
finish, to my satisfaction, the last two chapters of this godforsaken book I’m
writing. Just to offer some highlights.

Compared to the hardcore Rapturites, though, I’m in pretty good
shape. Did you hear the
interviews on NPR last weekend? “It broke my heart,” my friend
D.E. said in email. “There
was this one couple with a baby and one on the way and they’d
pretty much spent their last dime. You have to just hear the voices
of these people. They’re totally lost.” She’s right, it’s
tragic.

The architect of this particular Rapture scare is Harold
Camping, a former engineer who claims to have found numerical clues
in the Bible. He “first
predicted the end would come Sept. 6, 1994” but now contends
that, as of that date, he simply “had not completed his biblical
research. ‘For example, I at that time had not gone through the
Book of Jeremiah,’ he explains, ‘which is a big book in the Bible
that has a whole lot to say about the end of the world.'” On his
blog, Camping writes: “Many of you
have contacted me to ask what I will do on May 22, after the May 21
Judgement [sic] Day. I’ve been asked what I will do with my things,
and if I will give them away to those who write an entire one line
email to me. After the May 21 Rapture, many of us will no longer be
here, but this blog will live on. I have scheduled new posts to
come out between May 21st and October 21st 2011, that will help
those dealing with the End Times of the Apocalypse. [Emphasis
mine.] If you do not think you will be saved in the May 21
Judgement [sic] Day Rapture, then please bookmark this page now to
visit on May 22.” “Now that’s service,” D.E. said.

An unusual aspect of
Camping’s Judgment Day catechism is that, like the Puritans’ and
the Presbyterians’, but unlike most evangelicals’, it rests on the
notion of predestination—that some people, the elect, are chosen by
God for salvation, while the rest will perish. I say “unusual”
because Rapture-readiness scaremongering originated with Hal
Lindsey’s bestselling 1970 book The
Late Great Planet Earth, which is decidedly not a
predestination text. Lindsey, like the Methodists and the Baptists
and the Pentecostals, is a big-tent guy. If you ask Jesus to
forgive your sins and invite Him into your heart, under the Lindsey
doctrine you are guaranteed salvation. This openness, with its
emphasis on God’s endless capacity to forgive, has been the
emerging trend in Protestantism, so it’s a little surprising to see
Camping’s date—and far more restrictive vision of Eternal
Life—getting so much attention.

For his part, on his own website, Lindsey—who once
wrote, “the decade of the 1980s could very well be the last
decade of history as we know it”—offers the
following wisdom: “I want all of my friends to know that I AM
AGAINST any form of predicting a specific day that the end of this
age and the Rapture will occur. I am well aware that a Christian
teacher has predicted that the end of this age will occur on May
21st 2011. When this fails, it will be used by our enemies to
discredit the expectation that the Rapture could take place at
any-moment.”

All of which is to say that the End Times fables of
fundamentalist Protestants are multitudinous and fractious; minor
denominations have actually splintered over them. A popular wall
poster in the 1980s—one forever selling out of stock and being
reordered at
my mother’s storefront church/bookstore—depicted cars and
planes crashing as their righteous drivers rose, ethereal and
glowing, into the sky. Jesus would whisk the believers up to
Heaven, my mother explained, and the heathens remaining would have
to endure not just the aftermath of a million fiery collisions but
the rest of the Tribulation. You could still be saved if you
weren’t Raptured up, but it would be difficult. I’d go over the
details, but it seems wrong to lead you any further into this
doctrinal thicket.

Suffice it to say that there are a thousand iterations, at
least, of the Rapture story, each with its own creative, deeply
punitive twist. If you’re looking for confirmation in the plain
language of the scriptures, however, you won’t find much. John Nelson Darby invented the pre-tribulation
Rapture doctrine in the 19th century by stitching together verses
from various parts of the Bible.

Mark Twain once wrote about the trouble he had gathering
material for his
childhood biography of Satan. “There were only five or six
[facts],” he recalled. “You could set them all down on a
visiting-card.” With the help of his Sunday school teacher, “on
fifteen hundred other pieces of paper we set down the
‘conjectures,’ and ‘suppositions,’ and ‘maybes,’ and ‘perhapses,’
and ‘doubtlesses,’ and ‘rumors,’ and ‘guesses,’ and
‘probabilities,’ and ‘likelihoods,’ and ‘we are permitted to
thinks,’ and ‘we are warranted in believings,’ and ‘might have
beens,’ and ‘could have beens,’ and ‘must have beens,’ and
‘unquestionablys,’ and ‘without a shadow of doubts.’” Predictions
of the impending apocalypse have about the same level of textual
support. “What God lacks is convictions — stability of character,”
Twain quipped. “He ought to be a Presbyterian or a Catholic or
something — not try to be everything.”

***

My mother was raised an
atheist by an atheist
Texan mother who herself had a stridently atheist Texan father. As
far as I know, Mom remained contentedly godless through college.
When I was three or four, she and my dad became Presbyterians, but
she soon started reading the Bible for herself and questioning the
catechism and she ultimately left the flock in fury over
predestination after the minister told the parents of a boy killed
by a speeding car that his death had been God’s will. My parents’
attempts to compromise on other denominations didn’t go so well;
Mom argued with the pastors and the Sunday school teachers; the
Baptists actually asked us to leave. Soon she had her own Bible
study, and was speaking in tongues and laying hands on the sick and
casting out demons, and eventually, first in our living room and
finally in a warehouse, she had her own church. People were
scandalized; a woman preaching was an aggressive act.

What’s most remarkable to me now about her sudden religiosity is
that the zeal and the leadership impulses that seemed in my
childhood to spring up out of nowhere have forerunners she was
barely, if at all, aware of. One of her grandmothers was a
“devoted Pentecostal ‘holy roller'” (my mother’s words) who not
only donated her son’s insurance proceeds (from an accident that
left him a paraplegic) to the church but, at some point at least,
actually lived in it. Mom knew this growing up, but vaguely; her
dad’s family was something of an
abstraction. Then, a few years ago, long after her own place of
worship was shuttered, she learned that her maternal grandmother’s
sister and niece had joined together and “voluntarily started and
pastored the only church in Stockard
for many years until they finally got a man to come in from
somewhere and take over.”

Okay, it’s not as if religious fervor was scarce in 20th-Century
Texas. But recently I discovered that Mary Bliss Parsons, my ninth
great-grandmother and my mom’s eighth, beat witchcraft
charges—twice—in Northampton, Massachusetts, where her husband
Joseph moved the family because Mary couldn’t get along with the
people of Springfield. She was beautiful and opinionated, with a
“harsh,” “often accusatory” manner, and she was given to “fits”
that incited Joseph to
lock her in the basement. According to the authors of Entertaining Satan: Witchcraft and the Culture of Early New
England:

She and her husband were frequently and notoriously at odds with
one another. During part of their time at Springfield he had sought
to confine her to their house. (Otherwise, he said, “she would go
out in the night … and when she went out a woman went with her and
came in with her.”) When this tactic failed, he locked her in the
basement. It was then, she claimed later on, that she had first
encountered her “spirits.” There was at least one quite public
episode — again at Springfield — that amounted to a family
free-for-all. Joseph was “beating one of his little children, for
losing its shoe,” when Mary came running “to save it, because she
had beaten it before as she said.” Whereupon Joseph thrust her
away, and the two of them continued to struggle until he “had in a
sort beaten [her].”

Witchcraft accusations surfaced soon after the family settled in
Northampton. Mary gave
birth to a healthy baby boy—her fifth child—and the following
year a neighbor’s newborn died. When the grieving mother claimed
Mary had cursed the baby, Joseph tried to protect the family’s
good(?) name by going on the offensive.
No stranger to the courtroom, he initiated a defamation suit
against the neighbor who’d started the rumors. This approach was
tricky, and fraught; while the “immediate outcome of [slander]
actions was usually favorable to the plaintiff,” the “long-range
effects were mixed.”

Mary Parsons, the wife of Joseph Parsons, … being
instigated by the Devil, hath … entered into familiarity with the
Devil, and committed several acts of witchcraft on the person or
persons of one or more.

Ultimately the jury acquitted her, but Mary’s case is seen
as a precursor to the Salem Witch Hysteria of 1692.

It’s interesting, to me at least, to ponder the parallels
between her story and my mother’s life. Both women were difficult
and nonconforming and, by some accounts, mad; both purported to
encounter spirits; both were accused of Devil Worship. When I was a
child, the Presbyterians and Baptists all but called Mom a Satanist
as they showed us the door. The legacy of loudmouthed, intractable
women might run back in the other direction, too. By all accounts
Mary’s mother Margaret
was prickly and litigious, a force among Puritans.

I can’t speak for the rest of the gene pool, but the women in my
branch of Mary’s tree are basically all, in different ways,
misfits. Eccentricities and diagnosable mental illnesses vary, but
the common theme is an unwillingness to bend to the expectations of
polite society, a.k.a. a need to pursue our weird interests and
passions whenever, wherever, and however we want.

***

When my incomparable stepdaughter, now 17, was visiting
recently, I told her how pathetic I always found it at her age when
adults would say, “Can you believe I’m 40? I don’t
feel 40! I still feel 22!” And I would look at their
eye wrinkles and their dull hair and mom jeans and I would think,
Well, you sure do look 40, so suck it up. Jeez.
Knowing how obnoxious I was to my mother in my teenage years, I
wouldn’t be surprised if I actually said those words to her. I said
far worse, that I do know.

Obviously I don’t think 40 is the end of the road—some of my
favorite people are closer to twice that. It’s just that some of us
age more naturally, more gracefully, more normally than
others. I think a lot these days about the fact that I haven’t had
children; it’s not that I regret the decision, just that it sets me
apart, defines me in some way I’m not sure I was prepared to commit
to. I’m a reluctant New Yorker, a loving but irregular wife, a
refugee from the practice of law, a blogger who’s lost interest in
regular blogging, a critic who never planned to be one and a
supposed writer who’s only now finishing her first novel. What the
hell, in other words, am I doing with my life?

Before my mom turned 70 last June, we had gone six years without
speaking. When I called to wish her a happy birthday, though, we
started talking and didn’t want to stop. Her passions are as
extreme and unpredictable as always, and sometimes have unfortunate
consequences—she sleeps with a shower curtain between her sheets
and bedspread so that she doesn’t have to get up in the night if
one of her ten dogs has an accident—but they are never boring.

Mom has been a cat hoarder, a bird breeder, a dog rescuer and,
of course, a preacher. Nowadays she has turned her attention to
fruit trees. My stepfather jokes that she confuses them with sofas
because she’s always wanting him to uproot them and move them
around. She has 20 apple trees, four apricot, five nectarine, six
peach, three cherry, one mulberry, five pear (of four varieties),
one plum, a dwarf lemon or two, and four or five elderberry bushes.
No doubt this is a sad statement on what one finds interesting at
midlife, but I love to hear her talk about them. In fact, at first,
my joy at being back in touch with her was so extreme that I would
often sit at my computer for the duration of our conversations,
quietly typing up everything she said.

“I hit the jackpot last year, as I usually do,” Mom told me last
summer. “I went to Kmart in, oh, I guess May or June, and I spied
these wonderful dwarf trees that grow to be about six or seven feet
tall. They were $50 apiece. I wasn’t about to pay that, but I kept
looking at them and looking at them, and they didn’t sell any, so
they marked them down to $25, and I bought three, and then they
went to $18 and I bought three more, and then they eventually
dropped down to $8 and I bought the rest. They don’t give you as
much fruit as a great big tree would, but you can’t get the fruit
up at the top of a great big tree.” Later, the unseasonable heat
had her worried. “I have a whole bunch of grapes. I’ve got
thousands of grapes out there, but the leaves that shelter the
grapes from the sun are starting to look kind of brown and
downcast.” Downcast leaves! This is the way she speaks, bluntly,
rhythmically, sometimes poetically. I needed the time away from
her, but I also really missed her.

So, does my mother expect to be Raptured up on my fortieth
birthday? Does she see me as her wayward lamb, a child out of touch
with Jesus who will be Left Behind to endure the Tribulation? Is
she, even now, jarring and canning food so that my sister and I
will have plenty of pickles, prunes and jams if we can make it down
to her house in the midst of the apocalypse? I don’t know.

I do know that she has 40 fruit trees, is obsessed with demons,
lives in surroundings more characteristic of Hoarders than
Good Housekeeping, is completely self-reliant and seems
remarkably happy. Whatever else she is, my mother is living proof
that getting older doesn’t predestine anything. And on May 22,
2011, when I awake in Cape Cod with a colossal hangover, all the
wrinkles on my face cast into full relief by dehydration, I’m sure
that will serve, if not as inspiration exactly, as some sort of
consolation.

Maud Newton is a
writer and critic best known for her blog, where she has written
about books since 2002.